Alex Wolfe, on 13 October 2013 - 08:15 AM, said:
Except that robots are not blocks of solid matter, there will be room inside and they're made of spaaaaaace materials, so they can be arbitrarily made to have any density. As such, balance becomes the only criterion to base mech size on.
Given complete freedom, why would anyone want to make the already unpopular class gigantic (meaning, gimped balance-wise)? We may never know, but after a year of it continuing it starts to look like a cruel practical joke/human endurance experiment.
Except this is a game where material density does not matter, because we have
hitpoints. If you give something the same amount of volume with lower hitpoints, it will be just as easy to hit and go down faster.
This isn't like WoT where you can say you have 4" of armor placed at a certain angle of deflection covering a certain section (and perhaps another section with a different thickness of armor at a different angle) with the internal components placed in certain locations within the geometry that you have to penetrate through the armor
just right in order to hit.
Here in MWO we have a volume of geometry with X hitpoints. It doesn't matter at what angle the armor is placed or how thick it is, or how spaced out the internal components may be. When that volume's armor hitpoints are finished, you start doing damage to the internal structure hitpoints, with Y chance to cause damage to the items in that location. When that volume's internal structure hitpoints are gone, that section is destroyed.
Edited by DirePhoenix, 13 October 2013 - 11:12 AM.